If Life Gives You Lemons Make Lemonade

Our next door neighbor Theodore had a birthday approaching and I needed to think of a really tasty birthday cake. I also wanted to try an experiment, so this seemed like a good time to combine 2 events. When I try an experiment, it has to be tested on several people. This serves 2 purposes: if it’s tasty, I have succeeded and my creation is in high demand for the next social gathering. If it’s nasty, Hubby and I aren’t stuck eating a disaster for the next 5 days. Hmm…I never noticed that there is only a letter difference between tasty and nasty. That could be a sign.

I was in the baking aisle at the grocery store and found what I was looking for: Duncan Hines Perfectly Moist Lemon Supreme cake mix. Lemon is my absolute favorite flavor. Naturally, I consume vast quantities of chocolate, but that’s only for medicinal purposes. Then I found Duncan Hines Creamy Lemon Supreme frosting. This was going to be so tasty. But then, I started using my imagination, which should probably be limited to sharing tall tales. I spotted a box of instant lemon pudding and wondered how delicious my cake would be with the addition of lemon pudding.

Back in my kitchen, I assembled all my ingredients, which was the last thing I did correctly. As I was combining mix, water, oil, pudding and eggs, I remembered that my son-in-law Jed always adds just a dollop of mayonnaise to a cake mix. Jed makes fantastic cakes and I always request that he make my birthday cakes. If adding mayo works for Jed, it was bound to work for me. Mayo went into my big mixing bowl and the beaters began to whirr. The batter seemed a little stiff – that dry pudding mix was probably beginning to go into full pudding mode with all the water and oil it was exposed to. I added a little more water.

At this point, that little saying came into my head: “When cooking, follow your heart. When baking, follow the recipe.” How often have I ignored that little voice and regretted not heeding its advice?

I was too far into my experiment to back out. If you don’t bake, you might not be aware of the difficulty in separating ingredients once they have been thoroughly combined. I had to keep moving forward. I poured fragrant lemony batter into two 9-inch pans and baked them for the time required on the box. The kitchen smelled delicious. And then my timer went off.

There in the oven were two beautiful yellow cake layers. I was so relieved. I set the cake pans on wire racks to cool and watched those luscious lemony layers begin to deflate. They deflated a whole lot. They looked like 2 elevators going d-o-w-n. After they sank as far as they could go, they looked like two fluffy pancakes.

I had 2 cans of Lemon Supreme frosting on the countertop, so I kept plowing through this disaster. I put a cake layer on a plate and started slathering frosting. I could be very generous with the frosting since the square footage of the cake was way below average. Frosting can disguise a multitude of imperfections but it can’t make two fluffy pancakes look like a full size layer cake. Using 2 cans of frosting made my little hat about a half inch taller. This cake looked like a pastel porkpie hat. It belonged on the head of a cheap comic, not on Theodore’s dining table. When I did all that was possible with the frosting, my puny little cake actually looked pretty – for a short cake. And it smelled heavenly. I had to try it out.

And it tasted okay, not perfect, but okay. We can probably thank those 2 cans of frosting for improving the level of taste from ‘toss it out’ up to ‘okay’. The cake was just a little too moist. Who am I kidding? It was much too moist. I decided to take it next door anyway. I picked up the cake to put in my cake carrier and the whole thing weighed about 12 pounds. I’ve made pound cakes before. This was a pounds cake. As Hubby and I arrived, Theodore was outside surveying the damage that squirrels were doing to his blueberry bushes. He had tried everything and nothing deterred those critters.

Once inside, Hubby appeared to be estimating the hat size of this cake. Theodore and Eloise both declared that the cake was absolutely delicious. Aren’t they sweet? They are even better friends than I gave them credit for. I wanted to spare them anymore suffering so I promised to take that cake home and dump it in the trash. They wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted to keep it. How gracious can a couple be?

Hubby and I went home and got ready for bed. I happened to glance out the window and saw Theodore putting hunks of cake all around his blueberry bushes.

Even the squirrels agreed - this cake was a real lemon! But Theodore finally had a solution to his varmint problem. I went ahead and bought another box of cake mix, pudding and frosting for Theodore so that after the rains take care of the first cake, I can send another 12-pound cake over to eradicate those squirrels.